Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

Two people in medical coats race onto the lawn to collect the blood from the umbilical cord. Which, yes, will cost the Stanhopes 75 percent of our monthly income to store in a private blood bank.

“Please no,” Sarah says when the doulas present to the Stanhopes the disk of the slimy, wound-up umbilical cord ( Once it dries out, it’s the ideal chew toy for the baby! ).

* * *

By Saturday afternoon,Mara Stanhope is stretched out in her lounge chair beneath an umbrella. She looks like a woman at a spa, not a woman who gave birth less than twenty-four hours ago. That smell of newly cut grass. She’s holding a tall glass containing a bloodred drink, sipping the liquid through a long straw.

“OMG,” Sarah says after taking a peek. “A placenta smoothie. Let me take Lu to ballet today, okay? All these good vibes are killing me.”

I saw Sarah’s (or, I guess, Lulu’s) placenta for about five seconds before it was tossed into a container of organs and wheeled away.

A nurse carries a woven basket out onto the lawn. It takes me a minute to realize that the baby is inside the basket. The nurse places the baby on Mara Stanhope’s chest and Mara pulls her robe aside and the newborn takes the nipple easily, almost lazily, like an old pro. Those early days with Lulu, when she barely nursed, and then there was the heat wave, I prefer not to think about, Sarah hooked up to the breast pump for hours every day, me trying to pretend the pump didn’t freak me out. “What’s wrong?” Sarah sobbed, her nipples extending and retracting inside the plastic tubing. “Nothing, sorry, sorry,” I kept saying, cradling Lulu.

The nurse leaves and Steve Stanhope comes out. He looks happy, healthy. He sits at the base of Mara’s lounge chair, stroking her shin. They smile and talk quietly. I can’t tell what they’re saying, except that I keep hearing the word “lake,” “lake,” “lake,” the syllable punctuating their every sentence.

He wanders off and she reclines, closes her eyes. Their vegetable garden is thriving already, even this early in the season. I can see the kale and mint from here.

“Excuse me,” the voice says, or rather the mouth, the mouth right against my eye, breath in my pupil.

I leap back and cover my eye as though it’s been burned.

“Pardon me,” the mouth says. “I noticed this hole the other day. I’ll have our guy seal it up ASAP.”

Steve Stanhope speaks graciously, maybe even with compassion, as though he knows it isn’t good for me or anyone else in my building to witness the activity on his lawn.

“Oh, no problem,” I say, annoyed with myself for how grateful I feel that he’s playing it as though he’s inconvenienced me rather than the reverse.

Then it’s his eye at the hole. His eye upon the deteriorating brick, the row of trash cans swollen with garbage, Lulu’s hand-me-down scooter chained to the communal bike rack. The eye lingers.

“Hey, screw you!” I say.

The eye doesn’t react. Had I whispered it too softly for him to hear? Had I said it at all?

“Say, neighbor,” Steve Stanhope says. “My wife gave birth to a baby girl last night, and I’d love to give you a little something as a kind of celebratory gift, because, well, there’s nothing like having a baby girl.”

As if I don’t know.

“Sort of like the way I’d’ve given you a cigar back in the day, you know?”

“Okay,” I say.

“Just a sec,” he says. And even though I don’t want anything from Steve Stanhope, I stay there at the peephole, waiting. Maybe if he hadn’t said “Say,” I might not have stayed. But it’s a tic of mine too sometimes, to say “Say.”

I’m keeping an eye on the peephole when suddenly I sense a flutter at the top of my head, like a bird just pooped on my hair. I look up to find the tiniest drone I’ve ever seen hovering above me. The drone beeps and drops something small onto the concrete beside me.

“Hey, pick it up,” Steve Stanhope requests. I bend down to retrieve the object. It’s a perfectly round pebble, pure white, like the moon of my boyhood. “You can plant it between the cracks in concrete. It’ll grow wherever.”

“Ste-eve!” Mara sings out across the lawn. “Ste-eve!”

“Gotta run.” The eye winks. “Enjoy, okay? Nice chatting with you. And don’t worry, the hole will be repaired any day now.”

“Does it need water?” I remember to ask only once he’s out of earshot.

* * *

“You can doit!” I say to Lulu. Dusk on Saturday, and we’re standing above the seam between two slabs of concrete in the enclosure behind the building. Sarah refused to come outside.

“A weird random magic pebble seed thingy?” Sarah had said, scrubbing hard at the nonorganic apples in the sink. “From Steve Stanhope ? No thanks.”

“It’s a gift,” I countered. “From a neighbor.”

“Isn’t he the one who put those radioactive fish in the canal to eat the other even more radioactive fish?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

“Well don’t let Lulu touch it,” she said.

Now, as we stand at the back of the building, I drop the seed into Lulu’s palm.

“It’s cold!” she gasps.

“Looks like the moon, right?” I say. “I mean, that’s what the moon used to look like.”

“Okay,” she says.

Okay.

“So,” I say. “Plant it.”

“Where?” She looks around the concrete enclosure. “Is there some dirt?”

“Well actually,” I explain, “this is a special kind of seed. It doesn’t need even the teensiest bit of dirt.”

“Okay,” she says again. Sometimes I worry about Lulu. She doesn’t seem like a child at all. She never uses words like “teensiest.”

“So all you have to do is just plant it right here between these pieces of concrete. See?” I stroke the seam with the tip of my sneaker. I’ve never seen anything green in our backyard, not even weeds poking up between the cracks.

“So, I should plant it?” she says. “Like, put it here?”

Carefully, she places the seed on the seam.

“Well,” I say, trying to pull my mood up by my own bootstraps, “is that where you want your plant to grow? You have to think these things through.”

“Well,” Lulu says, “I guess someone might step on it when they were taking their trash out. So maybe we should — put it somewhere else?”

I get the distinct feeling that she’s humoring me. Lulu is so good at love. I’m the oldest in our household, followed by Sarah and then Lulu. But in terms of souls, Lulu’s the oldest and I’m the youngest.

“ Plant it somewhere else,” I correct her.

“Yeah,” she says.

“You decide.” I pluck the seed off the ground and place it in her palm again.

She walks around the concrete enclosure, cupping the seed, examining all the seams. It takes her about forty-five seconds. We’re talking six feet by ten feet, max. A siren wails by on the street and — absentmindedly, accurately, the way I used to hum along when a familiar song came on the radio — Lulu imitates its howl under her breath.

Then she stops and plants the seed between two slabs. By “plants” I mean she shoves the pebble as far as it can be shoved into the crack.

On the other side of the wall, the Stanhopes’ generator hums maddeningly. I wonder if we reap any benefit from living so near it.

“Fun, huh?” I say as she stands up. I’m expecting her to be polite and accommodating when she glances at me, enthusiastic for my sake.

But there’s an actual glow in her eyes, the delight moving slow and stately across her face.

She says, “I should water it, right?”

Bingo.

* * *